Jack Turner - Spice - The History of a Temptation

The drama was played out on a global stage. The golden age of discovery was also the golden age of European piracy, when freebooters could plunder their way to royal favour and enrichment. The talismanic figure in this respect was Sir Francis Drake, whose Golden Hind was only the second ship to circumnavigate the globe. On the way he called at Ternate in 1579, sailing off with a cargo of cloves and agreement from Sultan Babu to reserve the trade in cloves to the English. For his part, Drake promised to build forts and factories, and ‘to decorate that sea with ships’. It was a bargain that would never be fulfilled, yet the treaty was more far-reaching in its ramifications even than the lordly haul of stolen Spanish silver and gold that had the Spanish ambassador in London demanding Drake’s head. With such dizzying profits in the air, Drake’s treaty with Babu sent shivers of excitement up the spines of the investors, and would-be imitators lined up to follow his lead. In view of the effect the treaty seems likely to have had on the merchants of London, culminating in the formation of the East India Company two decades later, Drake’s agreement with Babu was quite possibly the single most lasting achievement of his voyage.

Like Drake, these spice-seekers were seldom chary of robust methods. A spice ship represented a fortune afloat, and from a strictly commercial point of view it was considerably cheaper and easier to plunder the returning ships than to make the long and dangerous voyage for oneself. Galleons and caravels returning from the Indies ran a gauntlet of pirates and raiders, lurking in the Atlantic to deprive the exhausted and disease-depleted crews of their precious cargoes. One such haul was witnessed by Samuel Pepys in November 1665, when as Surveyor-Victualler to the Royal Navy he inspected two captured Dutch East Indiamen. On board he saw ‘the greatest wealth lie in confusion that a man can see in the world – pepper scatter[ed] through every chink, you trod upon it; and in cloves and nutmegs, I walked above the knees – whole rooms full … as noble a sight as ever I saw in my life’.

By now, however, this was a token victory for the English, since their own outposts in the Spice Islands had long since gone the way of the Portuguese before them. One English merchant in the Moluccas reported that the Dutch ‘grew starke madde’ at having to share the proceeds from the Moluccas’ cloves and nutmeg. Accordingly, in February 1623 the staff of the English factory on the central Moluccan island of Ambon were rounded up, tortured and killed. Their fate had been foreshadowed a few years earlier by the destruction of the English outpost on the nutmeg island of Run, which was then denuded of its trees for good measure. The ‘crying business of Amboyna’ prompted an outburst of pamphlets, anti-Dutch tirades and even a play by Dryden ( Amboyna – admittedly, not one of his better works; Sir Walter Scott considered it ‘beneath criticism’), its jingoistic huff periodically recycled ever since. The affair was finally tidied up with the signature of the treaty of Breda at the conclusion of the second Anglo – Dutch war of 1665–67. The English renounced their claims in the Moluccas in return for acknowledgement of their sovereignty over an island they had seized from the Dutch, the (then) altogether less spicy New Amsterdam, better known by the victors’ name of New York. *

In the longer term, however, such seizures and horse-trading, while spectacular, were unsustainable. There was more to be made from commerce than plunder – a distinction those at the sharp end of the spice trade would not perhaps have recognised – and by now the lion’s share of that trade was in Dutch hands. After several decades of mercurial, spasmodic English forays in the first half of the 1600s, but without any consistent investment from London, by the middle of the century the Dutch had emerged as the uncontested masters of the spice trade. They had achieved what the Portuguese had sought in vain: dominance in the trade in pepper and cinnamon, and a near total monopoly in cloves, nutmeg and mace.

Under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company, the Vereenigde Oosrindische Compagnie (VOC), the problems that beset the trade were gradually ironed out. The bandit capitalism of the early days evolved into a more recognisably modern and permanent system. The market-disrupting cycle of gluts and shortages was succeeded by a ruthlessly efficient monopoly. The catastrophic losses of life and shipping along the African coasts were reduced to a sustainable level. Much of the risk was taken out of the business. Whereas the finances of Portugal’s Estado da India never made the leap out of medievalism, hamstrung by clumsy royal monopolies and endemic corruption, the annual fleets setting off from the Zuider Zee were backed by the full panoply of joint stock companies, shareholders and boards of directors. In time the East India companies of the Dutch and their English rivals grew into the armies and administrators of formal imperialism.

Such were, very briefly, the bloody, briny flavours of the spice age. But if the discoverers marked the beginning of a new era, so too they marked an end, for even their efforts formed part of a grand tradition. In his opening stanza Camões claimed that da Gama and his Christian spice-seekers ventured into ‘seas never sailed before’, but in fact the spice routes had been navigated for centuries, albeit not by Europeans, or at least not very many of them. As tends to be the way with pioneers, even the discoverers had precedents. Asia’s spices had been familiar in Europe long before Europeans were familiar in Asia – because someone, or rather various someones, had been to get them. Besides the disconcerting Moors who accosted his envoy on the beach, da Gama had the deflating experience of finding Italian merchants active along the Malabar Coast – some selling their services to Muslim rulers – and there had been others before. In this sense the discoverers’ achievements, however epic, were essentially achievements of scale. Neither the voyages nor the tremendous, transforming appetite that inspired them emerged from thin air. When da Gama and his contemporaries raised anchor spice was a taste that had already launched a thousand ships.

Had any of the protagonists in this vast and ancient quest been asked why this was so, some would have offered, if pressed, much the same functional answer as that given by modern historians: profit. The reputation of fabulous riches clung so closely to spices that some, as we shall see, considered them tarnished by the association. (Columbus himself was deeply embarrassed by the potential imputation of grubby, worldly motives to his quest, and was accordingly at pains to find some way of justifying the enterprise in terms of the spiritually worthy spin-offs: to retake the holy sepulchre, to finance a new crusade, to convert the heathen.) But if the medieval spice trader were asked why spices were so valuable and so sought after, he would have given answers that seem less intelligible to the modern historian than such reassuringly material arguments. In this regard the charms of spices admit no easy explanation, nor would our forebears have found the matter much less perplexing. Indeed part of their attraction, and the source of much of their value, was simply that they were inexplicable. Before Columbus and company remapped the world, spices carried a freight that we, in an age of satellites and global positioning systems, can barely imagine. Emerging from the fabulous obscurity of the East they were arrivals from another world. For the spices, so it was believed, grew in paradise.

That this was so was something more than a pious fiction. It was, in fact, something close to gospel truth, an article of faith since the early years of the Christian religion. One of many highly intelligent and educated believers was Peter Damian (1007–1072), the Italian Doctor of the Church, saint, hermit and ascetic in whose turbulent life the great issues of the eleventh century, somewhat in spite of himself, converged. In his hermitage at Fonte Avellana, in a bleak wilderness of rocks and crags in the central Apennines, he dreamed of that gentle place where, by the fount of eternal life,